Traditional telephony systems provide telephones that are loosely associated with specific users and are represented by numeric addresses in a coordinated, global numbering plan. Modern telephones generally have a simple keypad with ten digits and two special symbols, * and #, to initiate calls. These calls support and are generally limited to voice sessions.
In the world of Internet communications, a voice session is just one of numerous types of media sessions. Given the dominance of voice-based communications, many IP-based multimedia communication networks will start out with voice as the dominant media. As such, it is predicted that a significant community of initial users will find it attractive to use their familiar, traditional telephone sets, in conjunction with an adaptor that effectively provides a gateway between the traditional telephone and an IP network over which calls may be initiated and received.
IP networks typically use very flexible hierarchical alphanumeric addressing systems where a user's personal identity is associated with a domain identity. The user addresses or identities are often lengthy, complex, and include not only a significant number of letters, but also characters such as dashes, the at symbol @, and periods. Accordingly, simplistic number dialing that is easily accomplished from the keypads of traditional telephones is not sufficient for effective and ready initiation of calls that are not associated with a traditional directory number.
Due to the inherent complexity of the alphanumeric addressing scheme of IP networks, most of these IP networks use directory structures to store and rapidly call frequently accessed contacts. Often, these directories are made visible on a display of a user's client terminal and users can simply click on a contact, or scroll through a directory list to select the desired contact and initiate a call thereto.
Traditional telephony devices are normally only configured to generate a serialized number pattern to initiate a call. Further, to assist users in maintaining the efficient dialing of directory numbers, speed dialing has been implemented using both telephone-specific and network-centralized techniques. In general, speed dialing allows a user to input an abbreviated number sequence, generally with at least one special symbol, to initiate the dialing of a corresponding directory number. Unfortunately, such speed dialing is not available in an IP communication environment for those users having traditional telephony equipment coupled to the IP network via a terminal adaptor. Accordingly, there is a need for providing an effective speed dialing system for such users to afford the traditional benefits of speed dialing as well as overcome the difficulties in entering an alphanumeric address for the user.